May 20-21: Collar ties and more rafters

We got back to work, and morale is good again! Although it's still rained on us every day for the last week and a half, it's just not raining as MUCH every day. We got the collar ties up in the roof. They hold the two sides of the roof together, and are big pieces of rough-sawn hemlock (3"x10"x16'); very wet wood still and extremely heavy. They These will be exposed when the house is finished, we'll be putting drywall all the way to the roof peak, and the collar ties will give AJ something to swing around on.

We used a water level (1st picture) to set marks for where each of the ties were to be nailed to the rafters. Joe used the chain saw (more construction with the chain saw!) to cut an angle in the collar ties so that they could be nailed off to the rafters without sticking up above the roof plane. The rest was just muscle work; lifting them up and nailing them into place. They look real nice though, and now the roof is solid and immobile.

On Sunday we put in the rafters over the sun porch. Now we'll start putting in the roof overhangs aournd the rest of the house, and the house will start to look more and more like a barn. Only nicer.